The Dying & The Dead 1: Post Apocalyptic Survival (17 page)

She
let out a long breath, one that she hadn’t realised that she’d held in until
she felt the relief of releasing it. The chair that Eric had climbed on was
propped against the wardrobe, but otherwise the room looked normal.

She
backed up the final step and walked along the hall and into Kim’s room. As
Charles’s heavy boots followed, she reached the chair and moved it just far
enough away from the wardrobe to swerve suspicion. She turned and saw that
Charles filled the doorframe. He walked over the doorway and in two paces he was
in front of her.

Up
close, she could smell him. The factory aroma of aging leather. The smell of
the sweat that had collected under his arms and on his forehead. His breath,
sour with a hint of tobacco. He reminded her of a friend of Kim’s father. One who,
a few years before Kim was born, had lost himself to a gambling addiction. Once
he had been a moderately successful salesman with a wife and four kids, and a
year later he saw his children every other weekend and had taken a second job
to pay his debts.

Charles
put his hand on Heather’s shoulder and squeezed. She felt her muscles squirm
but fought hard to retain control.

“You’re
tense,” he said, and pinched her shoulder muscles between his thumb and index
finger.

She
lost the control that she’d so careful kept and jerked her shoulder. Charles
drew his hand away.

“You’re
making this difficult on yourself, Heather.”

The
veins on his temple seemed ready to pop through his skin, and despite the
casual tone of his voice, his cheeks looked red with heat. It was usually the
way someone looked before they got angry, and Heather knew because her mum used
to have the same tell-tale tick.

Charles
grabbed her arm and squeezed her bicep. She threw him off, this time not caring
to disguise her disgust. She hoped he felt unwelcome in her home. She hoped it
was a cold place for him.

“You’re
not looking around my house,” she said.

“I go
where I please when it’s the Capita’s business.”

A
voice drifted from the bottom of the stairs.

“Mum?
What’s going on?”

Charles
shouted in the direction of the stairs.

“It’s
okay, darling. Your mother is just disobeying the Capita and might have to go
to prison. You can look after yourself, can’t you? You can defend yourself when
the infected come for you?”

He
turned back to Heather and she could see from the size of his eyes beneath his
mask that he was smiling. Moments like this made him feel alive, she realised.
He was a vulture who fed on misery and fear.

Something
began to bubble in her. The idea of him threatening her daughter made her
breath catch in her throat. It made her wish she had a gun. God knew she could
get one from Wes if she wanted. She’d take it out and point it at his stupid
leather face. Her skin felt hot and itchy. She thought about Kim downstairs
with the soldiers, trying her best not to show her fear. The room seemed
smaller. It felt like a cage had been thrown down upon her, and that she might
never escape the Capita now. All because of him, this pathetic man.

Her
hand rose in the air as if guided there by a puppeteer. She brought her hand
back and then sent it toward Charles face. It met his face with a slapping
sound that had finality about it. As she drew it back she was stunned and
wondered what she had done, as though a possessing entity had controlled her,
doomed her, and then left her.

Charles
put his hand to his face. He stared at Heather and shook his head. She thought
about apologising to him, but somehow she knew that the words would fall from
the air as soon as she spoke them. There was a wall around Charles’s mind now,
and anything Heather had to say would not get through it.

Charles
left the room and stood at the top of the stairs.

“Max,”
he shouted.

Heather
heard two sets of boots move downstairs. Had both the soldiers responded to the
name, she thought? Were both of them called Max? Were all the Capita’s soldiers
called Max? Did a Capita production line churn out soldier clones, all of them
given the same name by an official with no imagination? She smiled to herself
with the kind of amusement only a resident of death row could enjoy.

Charles
gave a long sigh. He leaned against the bannister.

“Go
outside into the garden,” he told the soldiers. “Pull out all the food and
collect it in a bag or something. It belongs to the Capita now. Take them back
to the stores, and don’t bother waiting for me. I’ll finish up here.”

“But
sir,” said one of the soldiers.

“Just
go.”

He
turned to face Heather. The look in his eyes made her feel like a wounded
animal caught by a hyena. It was amazing the mix of emotions Charles could
convey with just his eyes. It was as though the mask didn’t hamper him. It was
a part of him.

“Kim?”
he called over his shoulder. “Come upstairs. Your mother wants you.”

Heather
felt a shiver sliver up her spine and spread its chill across her. With every
inch it covered she felt her body lock down. First her legs, freezing her in
place, then her arms, which wouldn’t leave her sides. As the man in the plague
doctor mask approached her, she wanted to shut her eyes but at the same time
didn’t dare.

Kim
bounded up the steps and into the room. Charles spoke, but his eyes didn’t
leave Heather’s for an instant.

“Stand
next to your mother, Kim.”

Heather
was dimly aware of Kim’s arms wrapping around her, but her senses were numb.

“I’m
scared, mum.”

Heather
strained to move her arm. She broke through the fog of fear just enough to hug
her daughter close to her.

From
downstairs she heard the sounds of boots walking across the hallway. They were
leaving with all of her food, and there was nothing she could do about it. A
person could plan and dream as much as they wanted, but there was always
someone with a dark mind and strength of authority who could take it all away.
As the front door slammed and silence settled over the house, she realised
their escape would not happen.

Charles
stood still. He said nothing, just stared at them through the eyeholes cut into
his mask. He moved his head a fraction of a centimetre as his gaze went from
mother to daughter. Every time his eyes moved toward her, Heather felt the
touch of snow on her skin. Time suddenly became endless, and Heather wondered
if the last seconds of your life were the longest of all.

“Have
you got a cold, little girl?”

Heather
felt Kim’s chin hit her waist as the girl shook her head.

Charles
looked down. “Then why is there shredded newspaper all over the floor?”

Heather
fought an urge to glance up at the wardrobe panel where she knew Eric watched
through the slats in the door.

“She
did have one,” said Heather. “But she’s better now.”

The
bounty hunter bent down, picked up a scrap of paper and brought it to his face.
He rubbed it in his fingers and let it fall back to the floor.

“Then
you don’t keep a tidy house, and someone’s not wearing their mask.”

Heather
fought to keep her voice firm.

“She’s
not exactly going to sneeze into her mask, is she?”

“Do
you know how people act when they’re hiding something?” said Charles. “There’s a
few ways. The short of it is that your body can betray you. Sounds silly, doesn’t
it? You’re trying to betray someone else, but your body is doing the same to
you. You’ll tell me that you haven’t seen the boy, but your head will nod
‘yes’. You’ll try to deceive me, but you’ll get out of breath.”

He
reached to his side and took hold of the chair. It scraped across the floor as
he moved it over to wardrobe.

“You’ll
repeat yourself. You’ll tell me more than I need to know, because you think
that sounds more truthful. You’ll cover your mouth and you won’t blink. Your
eyes will point in directions your mind doesn’t want.”

He
made sure the chair was firmly against the wall and then climbed onto it.

“In
short, Heather, your body will tell me what your brain is trying to hide. What
do you think I’ll find if I look in here?”

As he
reached up toward the top of the wardrobe, Heather knew that the game was
finished. She felt Kim press against her, and her blood rushed to her head so
fast she could hear it pounding in her ears. Dimly, from somewhere in the
future, she could hear her own screams as they locked her in the Capita’s
dungeons.

Her
numbness began to thaw as she pushed Kim away from her. She reached over the
book case next to Kim’s bed and picked up the ceramic jug that her daughter had
made in school.  Her body warmed as she crossed the room, and by the time she
reached Charles she was red hot.

She
kicked out with her right leg and hit the chair so hard that a wooden leg
snapped. The chair tipped over and the bounty hunter fell to the floor and
landed on his back. He turned around with more agility than she believed
possible.  As he went to get onto his feet, Heather raised the jug and swung it
at the bounty hunter’s forehead. His eyes grew large and she saw little red
veins in the whites. He moved his body and again she brought the jug down on
him, and this time it smashed into hundreds of pieces.

She
stood over the bounty hunter and gasped for air. Above her, the wardrobe panel
swung open and Eric poked his head out. The bounty hunter lay still on the
floor.

14

Ed

It was
almost as if Golgoth had forgotten the storm. When they left the town hall and
walked out onto the streets, a blue sky awaited them. Rather than cheer him up,
the lack of a dismal sky actually annoyed Ed. It seemed like there had been
just enough rain to flood the basement and ruin their plans and then, job
complete, it had dried up.

Rather
than existing solely to ruin their plans, Ed was beginning to suspect that the
storm had brought something else down on the island. There was a dim light
flickering somewhere in his memory, and he tried hard to find it.

He
remembered being a kid and being in bed. Hearing James retching into a bucket
beside his own bed, and hearing mum vomiting in the bathroom down the hall. It
was a week where the island of Golgoth had stood still, where the entire
population had been too ill to leave their homes.

Farmers
lost days of labour. One cow, through lack of milking some claimed, dried up.
Even the weekly council meeting was missed when Gordon Rigby, sickest of them
all, had covered the stone wall of his bathroom in vomit. One by one people had
dropped, and then one by one they recovered. After days of malnourishment and
dehydration, with stomachs too weak to even absorb soup, the island began to
recover. After that, fingers were pointed. Food producers were blamed. Some
said it was the milk. The recent lamb slaughter caused it, said others.

Finally,
after months of town hall debates, Gordon and the council voted to fly a
scientist and a food hygienist to the island. The mainland experts took
thousands of swabs and spent weeks pouring over them. The dairy farmers waited.
The cattle farmers paced their land. Nobody knew where the judgement would fall
and whose livelihood would be ruined. It turned out to be an airborne virus
that had nothing to do with the local produce.

“We
need to get to the harbour,” said Judith.

She
lifted her foot over a crack in the cobbled street and took a comically
overstretched step. Ed noticed that she did this a lot. No matter how much it
took her out of her way, Judith would never place her foot within an inch of a
crack in the cobbles.

Bethelyn
walked with her head staring at the floor. Her eyes were dull. She tapped the
poker against her shoulder.

“Does
anyone know how to sail?” said Ed.

“Nope,”
said Garry.

“No,”
said Judith, stepping to her right to avoid a split cobble.

Bethelyn
shook her head.

“Damn,”
said Ed. “That would have been incredibly fortunate.”

Judith
looked ahead of her down the street. Ed hadn’t seen any infected since they
left the hall. If any were nearby, they were good at hiding.

“Well,
this bodes well. Doesn’t make much sense to take a boat when none of us can
sail.”

Gary
had his hands stuffed into his pockets. His chin was spotted with flares of
acne and his eyebrows met each other above his nose.

“Don’t
see much of a choice.”

Judith
rolled her eyes. “It’s not the sort of thing that can be learnt off the cuff.”

Ed
knew what he had to do next. He was trying to avoid it if he could, hoping that
someone else would be able to sail. In their present situation, though, it made
no sense to carry on the pretence. If nobody else could step up, then he would
have to.

“I can
sort of sail,” he said.

This
time Bethelyn looked up.

“Sort
of? As in, you could paddle a dinghy if you had to?”

Ed
shook his head. “James used to have a boat. He tried to teach me, but I
couldn’t get past the basics. And I never sailed without him.”

Bethelyn
tried a smile but her lips barely moved.

“In the
land of the blind the one eyed man is king. But we’ve all got two eyes and
we’re going to watch how shit you are at sailing.”

“I
guess I’m the best you’ve got.”

Judith
looked in horror as she almost put her toe on a crack. She moved so quickly to
avoid it that her walk turned into a skip. As they moved down the street the
silence became oppressive. Houses stood alone on each side. Hundreds of years
ago, Golgoth had been built one house at a time as families left the mainland
in search of privacy, and there was a rule that no two houses could be built
within fifty feet of each other. The residents were already cut off from the
mainland, and it seemed that even on an island as small as this they wanted to
be isolated from each other.

Ed
remembered what it had felt like in the Dirty Feathers, the only pub on the
island. He remembered the way people would stare at each other from across the
table, and how one man would eye another with suspicion as he bought a round of
drinks at the bar. Despite how they pretended otherwise, nobody really liked
each other on the island. They’d come all this way to be away from other
people, after all. The problem was that living in such a small place was worse
than living in the most populated city on the mainland. No matter where you
went, eyes watched you and judged.

So it
was as the four of them walked down the street. The infected began to file
through gates, out from behind walls, and emerge from around corners as though
waiting for their cue. Bethelyn walked with her eyes on the ground. If they bothered
her, she didn’t show it. Gary moved closer toward Judith.

“Walk
fast and they can’t catch us,” said Ed. “Just watch out for anything that might
hide them.”

Before
long they reached a familiar house. It was one Ed dreaded seeing, yet he knew
that if they were going to the harbour, they would have to pass it. It was a
house where ivy clung to white walls and the remains of once healthy crops had
been scattered by the wind. Above the garden, higher than the walls, was a roof
which had caved in.

It was
only here that Bethelyn looked up from the floor. She gazed briefly at the
house she knew so well and for a second something entered her expression. Ed
couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was an emotion of some kind. As quick
as it appeared, Bethelyn hid it.

Ed felt
like he should do something. Put his hand around her shoulders maybe, just like
she’d tried to do for him the day before. He knew that people needed it
sometimes. There was something about human contact that reassured people, not
that Ed had ever felt that way. But maybe it wasn’t about what Ed felt.
Sometimes you had to play someone else’s game and try to think the way they
thought. He stepped in beside her and was about to put his hand across, when
something wailed in the air above them. It was a sound so sudden and so
deafening that he had to put his hand to his eyes.

“What
the fuck is that?” he shouted, his words straining against the wailing.

Judith
pointed at the road behind them where a wooden pole which stretched thirty feet
high. It was a telegraph pole, one that Ed had probably seen several times
every day of his life. Until now, he had never really noticed the speakers that
were at the top of it, and he definitely hadn’t known they were capable of a
sound like this. It was the kind of sound he imagined they heard in the Old
Wars when the enemy planes swooped overhead. Back then it would have sent
people running out of their house and spilling into air raid shelters. Today,
the sound brought something else.

From
behind hedges, trees, doorways and walls more infected headed toward them. At
first they were drawn by the sound but they soon saw something else that
interested them more. One by one the dead, who had once sat across from each
other in the pub, who had once chatted with one another in town meetings,
locked eyes on the four of them. They opened their mouths and bared their
teeth. They growled and groaned, cried and moaned.

There
were so many that the road behind them was cut off. Bethelyn held her poker in
her tense hands. Ed raised his knife. Gary held a thick stick but looked
awkward with it, like a publicity-seeking politician taking a penalty kick in
front over a thousand drunken football fans.

“The
harbour,” said Ed.

It was
a fight they could never win, and to attempt it was like blowing their own brains
out. The group headed by Bethelyn’s house and towards Ed’s, beyond which was
the harbour. It seemed too fortunate to Ed that the way to the harbour would be
clear of the infected, and as soon as he had the thought, five of them stumbled
from behind a hedge.

They
were less than three feet away. They reached out toward the survivors with
twitching fingers. One almost took hold of Gary but he sprang away to one side.
He let out a scream so surprising that Ed stepped back. Gary’s face grew as
white as the chalk of the island’s cliffs.

As one
of the infected reached for him again he yelped and dropped his stick to the
floor. An expression took over his face like that of a rat trapped in a corner.
As the infected reached for him Gary stepped back, took hold of Judith and
pushed her into the waiting arms of the monsters.

Before
Ed could even react, the infected had pulled Judith down to the ground. One of
them tore a hole in her arm, and another pulled sinewy flesh from her throat,
silencing her mid-scream.

Ed’s
stomach felt taut and his breath jammed in his chest. He moved toward Judith
but time seemed to be running at a quarter-speed. As he reached the first of
the infected he could only focus on the look on Judith’s face as she screamed
soundlessly in pain. One of the infected sat next to her and chewed on her
vocal chords. Ed wanted to save her, he wanted to say something, but all he
could do was think was
why isn’t she dead yet?

He
stabbed his knife through the skull of the first infected and let it fall to
the floor. Judith reached out and grabbed his wrist in a grip so strong it felt
like she was going to snap his bones. An infected leaned toward her ear as if
it was going to whisper to her, but instead it took hold of her fleshy skin and
ripped it apart.

Ed
opened his mouth to say something, he didn’t know what, but before he could
tease out the words Bethelyn’s poker pierced Judith’s throat and destroyed what
the infected hadn’t yet touched. Judith’s eyes glassed up and the life left
them. Ed felt as if his own windpipe was stabbed, and any words that were on
the brink of forming fell away.

Gary,
his mouth spewing sounds that sounded too savage to come from a person, pushed
away from Ed and started to run. Without pausing to look behind him he
disappeared behind a house and out of view, leaving Ed and Bethelyn alone.

The
rest of the infected closed in on them in from all sides. Ed took a couple of
steps so that he was next to Bethelyn
. This is it,
he thought.
This
was the end, and somehow he felt that it was only right he go feeling some kind
of closeness with someone. It didn’t matter that Bethelyn was a stranger; she
was as good a person as any to die next to. He wondered what he’d missed after
shutting himself away all this time, and wondered if their son and brother
becoming a hermit was what his dad and James would have wanted.

He
watched the infected pour toward them. There were over fifty island residents,
including children. In the seconds he had remaining he didn’t want to do the
math, but he knew that no matter what, there were too many to fight. Bethelyn
pulled her poker out of the brain of an infected. She stood next to Ed so that
their shoulders touched.

The infected
walked toward them. Their faces were blank, their eyes white and empty, like
fish eyes. It was a sea of them washing into shore, and it was time for Ed to
plunge into it. Screaming in pain wasn’t the way he wanted to go, and somehow
the lack of choice made it seem impossibly worse. He tried to control his
shaking, tried to convince his brain to accept a fate which the survival
instinct of any person would reject.

At the
top of the street more figures joined the infected. He didn’t believe it at
first, but soon Ed realised that these figures didn’t have blank faces or dead
eyes. In fact their faces were covered in masks, and as they passed the
infected they raised weapons and brought them down on the skulls of the dead.